Note 60 — Chapter XXI · EUTHYDEMUS.

Whately’s Logic, ch. v. sect. 5. Though Whately, like other logicians, keeps the Sophists in the foreground, as the fraudulent enemy who sow tares among that which would otherwise come up as a clean crop of wheat — yet he intimates also incidentally how widespread and frequent such fallacies are, quite apart from dishonest design. He says — “It seems by most persons to be taken for granted, that a Fallacy is to be dreaded merely as a weapon fashioned and wielded by a skilful Sophist: or, if they allow that a man may with honest intentions slide into one, unconsciously, in the heat of argument — still they seem to suppose, that where there is no dispute, there is no cause to dread Fallacy. Whereas there is much danger, even in what may be called solitary reasoning, of sliding unawares into some Fallacy, by which one may be so far deceived as even to act upon the conclusion so obtained. By solitary reasoning, is meant the case in which we are not seeking for arguments to prove a given question, but labouring to elicit from our previous stock of knowledge some useful inference.”

“To speak of all the Fallacies that have ever been enumerated, as too glaring and obvious to need even being mentioned — because the simple instances given in books, and there stated in the plainest and consequently most easily detected form, are such as (in that form) would deceive no one — this, surely, shows either extreme weakness or extreme unfairness.” — Aristotle himself makes the same remark as Whately — That the man who is easily taken in by a Fallacy advanced by another, will be easily misled by the like Fallacy in his own solitary reasoning. Sophist. Elench. 16, 175, a. 10.